A Heart for Freedom (11 page)

“What are you talking about?” I said, pointing to the twenty renminbi bill. “Our money is right here, and you still owe us change.”

The saleswoman snatched up the bill and tore it to pieces. When Feng reached out to stop her, he accidentally grabbed her watch and ripped the timepiece off its band. As I picked up my books from the counter, the saleswoman tried to pull them out of my arms. In the ensuing chaos, she managed to rip off my watch as well. It was a violent explosion in the middle of a quiet Sunday afternoon. Finally officers from the Beida security department arrived, and they escorted all three of us to their office.

The officer who handled the matter seemed to resolve it in a judicious manner. He listened to each of us in turn and then rendered his judgment. He said the saleswoman had no proof we had tried to steal anything. He advised her not to accuse customers so casually and not to rip up money belonging to other people, because it was private property. He then admonished Feng for grabbing the woman’s watch and breaking the strap, even in the heat of the moment. He insisted it would have to be repaired. Feng apologized to the saleswoman, who seemed reluctant to accept this resolution. The security officer decided to hang on to my watch until the saleswoman’s watch had been repaired.

My watch was important to me. It was a gift from my father. I immediately went out and found someone who could repair the strap on the saleswoman’s watch that afternoon. When I returned to exchange it for mine, the original security officer had left for the day, and a tall, skinny, unsmiling man had replaced him. He took the saleswoman’s watch into another room to determine whether it had been repaired. When he returned, he refused to give my watch back. He told me I would have to return for it later, when the other officer was around. He spoke to me with such arrogance, as if the original resolution had been reached without his consent and he wasn’t going to comply with it.

I immediately went and told Feng, and he went back with me to try to get my watch. This time the officer yelled at both of us as if we were criminals and again refused to return the watch. I later learned this man was a holdover from the Cultural Revolution, and this was his way of harassing people. The way he shouted at us stripped away all our pride and dignity. Feng refused to help me after that.

This was the same security department where I had come to report the attempted rape. Now I just wanted my watch back. My father was pressuring me to come home for a visit, and I knew he would notice if I wasn’t wearing my watch. Remembering how upset he’d been when I had made him waste the valuable bag of grain with the foster family, I did not want to disappoint him again. I had to have my watch back before I could go home.

Despite all the shouting and insults, I went back again and again for my watch. Each time I got a new story, a new runaround, along with more humiliation. The saleswoman must have had some influence over this vicious man because all her wrath was poured out through him.

The security officer also used his authority to investigate Feng and me. He quickly ferreted out Feng’s arrest on January 1 and my report of the attempted rape. Unpleasant rumors began to circulate about both of us. So, instead of getting my watch back, we were being slandered by rumor and innuendo.

I continued to return to the department, until one day I demanded to see the top official, a man in his sixties with a kind face and a patient demeanor. He reminded me of the early members of the Chinese Communist Party, who used to evoke trust and respect from people who went to them for help. The man listened as once again I explained what had happened at the store. Then he asked me the name of the officer who had handled the matter. It was a risk on my part, but I had no choice. When I told him the man’s name, he said nothing more. He asked me to wait while he went next door. A few minutes later, he came back with my watch.

Later that day I bought my train ticket home.

These experiences deeply wounded me. They broke my spirit and undercut my pride. When the saleswoman attacked my reputation, it went straight to my heart. And when the rumors began to fly, I felt surrounded by a cloud of condemnation with no way to vindicate myself. My only choice was to suck it up and endure.

On the way to the train station, Feng told me the head of his department had asked him whether he knew what kind of woman I was. When Feng assured him he did, the director urged him to think twice about his involvement with me, as if he were offering advice to his son. I felt powerless to defend myself. And I felt injured and betrayed—because, as Feng told me all this, I could hear a certain doubt in his voice, a hesitation, as if he could not quite summon up the conviction that all the rumors were false.

9

Resolutions

Aboard the train, the seats and aisles were packed with sweaty passengers. The dusty air reeked of body odor and cigarettes. I squeezed into a corner, with my hands on the frame of the overhead luggage rack, and rested my head on my shoulder for the long ride home.

Crush, crush, crush.
The voice of the train spoke to me as we hurtled along the track. Four years earlier my father had brought me to Beida on this very train. Then he was beaming with joy, confident in the vision he entertained of my great future. Now, after all my studying and training, I was bringing back nothing but broken dreams and a bleeding heart.

At Beida, when I transferred to the psychology department, I believed people could be healed through the help of others, and I was ready to charge out into society to use what I had learned to help and to heal—just as my parents had once been sent to the countryside to rescue the poor and the sick. Now that I was the one in need of rescue, the people I encountered seemed hateful and cruel. I felt confused and weak. If I could not even save myself, how could I save anyone else?

Crush, crush, crush.
In my misery, as I thought about all that had happened, I blamed myself. It was only a watch, after all. I could have let it go. It did not have to become the agent of my destruction. Instead, my future graduate studies were now in question, and so was my relationship with Feng. A simple, well-intentioned visit to help a depressed classmate had become an ordeal of deceit, violence, and slander. As a result, a hostile department could easily decide to send me to some remote province to complete my graduate studies. It was my dream, and Feng’s, to study overseas together. Now I could lose the man I loved and the opportunity to travel abroad.

I understood as never before that in China virtue and merit are not rewarded like a stable currency with a fair exchange rate. Instead, you have to purchase opportunity on the black market, through the medium of
guanxi
, a system that depends on the power of connections and favoritism. That’s not how I was raised, trained, or educated. The real Chinese system was not for me.

Crush, crush, crush.
At the ripe old age of twenty-one, I had tasted the bitter cup of defeat and despair—the feeling that, no matter how hard I tried, I could not overcome the inner hurt and outward assault of the world. These were not physical beatings or the severe kind of punishments that people considered enemies of the state suffered. Yet the whispers and insinuations swirling around me seemed no less terrifying.

Tears dripped down my cheeks. For the first time in my life, when I was supposed to know everything—or at least more than I had known before Beida—I simply did not know what to do. I was in such pain that the other passengers’ curious looks were the least of my concerns.

Hush, hush, hush.
As the train barreled on through the dark night, each stop reminded me I was one step closer to home, my rock and my refuge—the home my father had promised I could always come back to, no matter what happened. Today I needed to be there more than ever. I felt like a five-year-old girl again. I could no longer afford to be proud or stubborn. Like Scarlett O’Hara, I felt that once I got home, I would be strong again.

* * *

I arrived unannounced, to surprise everyone, as I always liked to do when returning home on break. I loved how everyone crowded into the living room, screaming and hugging me with tears of joy to welcome me home.

This time no one seemed surprised or particularly delighted when I arrived. As I stepped through the door, my dad was busy washing the dinner dishes in the kitchen, and my sister was in her room preparing for an exam. Dad looked older than I remembered, his usual ramrod-straight posture now hunched over like that of a man who had spent his life bearing loads of firewood on his back. I had always thought of my father as strong. Now he looked frail. And I detected unease behind his smile.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked him.

“She’s out running some errands.” As he spoke, he rapidly blinked his eyes. He did that whenever he had something on his mind.

“Why don’t you get some dinner, Ling Ling,” he said. “You must be hungry from the long trip. Sit down and eat.”

When I had finished my dinner, my father took my sister and me to show us the new apartment they would soon occupy. It was on a long street flanked by single-story apartment buildings. Chickens pecked at the ground in the late evening light. An older woman, a soldier who worked in the hospital with my father, called out to us as we walked along.

“Ling Ling, welcome back!” she shouted. “Did you come to visit your mom?”

“I’m just back for a short break,” I told her. “What about my mom?”

The woman started to say something, but my father intervened.

“We’re on our way to visit our new apartment,” he said. “Ling Ling hasn’t seen it.”

“What’s this about Mom?” I asked him as we hurried along.

“Oh, it’s nothing. She’s been a little under the weather, but everything’s fine.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Well . . . it isn’t exactly life threatening. She’s had a nervous breakdown.”

“What! Where is she?” A familiar sensation clenched at my throat. “I want to see her. Where is she?”

“Calm down,” Dad said. “We’ll go see her. It’s no big deal.”

We skipped the apartment and headed instead to the business district. Before long we were marching down a long hospital corridor with green doors on either side. Outside an open doorway to a darkened room, Dad motioned for my sister and me to stop so he could go in first. I heard him talking in a low voice, the way one speaks to a child who might be sleeping.

“Ling Ling just got back,” he said. “She’s come to see you.”

Slowly, my mother pushed herself up to a sitting position. Her face was puffy, and she was definitely a mess. She had been sedated, so when she tried to smile, it was hard for her to move her mouth.

“Oh, Ling Ling,” she said in a tiny voice. “You’ve come back.”

This was not the delightful mother I knew, the playful and bright woman who always came home from work smiling.

“Mom,” I said, hugging her. “What happened?”

Instead of hugging me, she pushed me away and said, “Ling Ling, you have to go. Right now. Go back to school. They’re after us. They want to get us. They want to chop our heads off. They say I stole the microscopes. They want us to pay for them, but we don’t have any money, Ling Ling. We spent it, we spent all of it, don’t you see? We spent it on school. Where will we find the money?” Her eyes were filled with terror. “Where? The security people are coming to get us.”

I turned to my father. “What’s this all about?”

Dad forced a dry, tight smile.

“This is how she talks when she gets sick,” he said. To my mother he said, “Don’t talk like that. Ling Ling just got back.”

“They had a meeting,” Mom persisted. “They’re coming to the house in a few days to shake us down.”

Dad’s face was somber. “When did you hear about this meeting?” he asked.

“This afternoon,” Mom said. “The head of the Party was here. I heard them talking in the hallway. Old Chai,” she said, addressing my father by his familiar patronymic, “take all of our money out of the bank and give it to Ling Ling and her sister before they come to take us away.”

“There isn’t much money in the bank,” Dad said, in a voice of resigned patience. Then, tenderly, he added, “You need to rest. Ling Ling wanted to see you right away, but she’s tired too. We’ll come back later.”

On the way home, my father told me my mother had not invented the story about the microscopes. Two valuable microscopes had vanished from her department at a time when my father happened to be absent on a long trip. Mom was the department director, an object of people’s envy, and a rumor had begun to circulate that she had stolen the microscopes to pay for my college education. Evidently people were saying the offense called for the death penalty. Because my mom was alone at the time, with no one to talk to, all the rumors and sideways glances began to gnaw at her. She’d finally broken down.

“When I came back and found her babbling like this,” my dad said, “I was just as shocked as you are.”

“Why hasn’t the security department made an investigation to find out who took those things?” I asked when we were in the safety of our home.

My father didn’t immediately reply. In his grief, he stared at the floor, trying to compose his response.

“You have to understand, Ling Ling. Your mother and I lived through the Cultural Revolution. It was a time that turned good, well-intentioned people into evil human beings, who—to save themselves, perhaps, or merely out of spite—accused others, who were utterly innocent, of being enemies of the people.”

He paused to rub his eyes with his forefingers, and sighed. “In those days, you were guilty until proven innocent. Any accusation automatically implied guilt. All they said about your mother was that she had keys to the storage room. Naturally, that meant she must have sold the microscopes on the black market. It’s the Cultural Revolution all over again.”

Dad paused again before concluding, “I think the people who stole the microscopes are the ones who have accused your mother.”